If the World is a Program
When we first learn geography we learn about how the world first came into existence. Some say that the Earth owes it’s existence to a massive supernova while some others…
Beyond Turing
The historical standard for testing AIs for intelligence has been the Turing Test. But it can be argued that the Turing test only confirms a mimicry of human conversation and…
A Bit of Logic: Understanding Bytes and Bits
If you haven’t heard already, a byte is a sequence of eight binary units. These binary units are called bits. While this is no great secret, the functioning of bits…
Expert Systems
An expert system is software that attempts to mimic human expertise by searching through a database of known answers or solutions in order to help solve a problem. Chains of…
Introduction to Game Programming or the Appaholic’s Ten-Step Program
Hello there, and welcome to my little article about making computer games. I assume that you’re reading this because you are at least a little interested in writing games. If…
Overview of Contract Programming
There are lots of avenues you can take to becoming a contract programmer. But before we explore some of those, you need to find out what you intend to do.…
Why do I Want to Use a JOIN Clause?
Recently a friend of mine asked me why he should use a JOIN statement rather than adding extra criteria to the where clause. It’s an interesting question, and I thought…
Why Visual Basic is like McDonalds
Why? At McDonalds you can order items the way you want them, and they are delivered FAST! But, you don’t have a completely open menu. You can only order certain…
Treatment of NULLs by Oracle & SQL Server
Oracle & SQL Server behave subtly differently when processing columns containing nulls. Consider the following series of SQL statements: CREATE TABLE tempone ( creditlimit NUMBER(6)); -- Oracle CREATE TABLE tempone…
8 Steps for Optimizing and Improving Your Visual Basic Code
Here are 8 steps to improve the readability, debug-ability and speed of your Visual Basic application. 1) Use Option Explicit (and the Require Variable Declaration setting) for ALL your modules…